Recruitment, Employee Leasing and Outsourcing, Recruitment: Inside versus Outside the Company.

Once the planning part of the process is complete, the firm will set forth to implement that plan through the next set of human resource concepts and tactics: recruitment, selection, appraisal, rewards, and employee personal and professional development.

Recruitment

Recruitment is the process by which companies attract candidates to fill present and future positions, and the appropriate method varies from company to company. In most cases, the human resources department in the company will work together with managers in departments throughout the company or with others familiar with the personnel needs to determine a recruitment method and approach.

Many recruitment methods are available, including Internet and print advertisements, employee referrals, and outsourced agencies (“headhunter” executive placement firms, job placement agencies, that perform recruitment services for the company, either on a fixed-fee arrangement, much like a consulting relationship, or on a performance-based basis where the fee is a percentage of the employee’s salary. In some cases, the employee will pay the fees associated with such outsourced services, but more often the company will pay these fees. Other recruitment tactics include job fairs and college recruiting and might involve a combination of several methods.

Employee Leasing and Outsourcing.

In the past decade, the use of “employee leasing” and temporary, or project-based, outsourcing of human resource needs has become more prevalent. In this scenario, the company contracts with another company that provides the employees for a specific need or project. The contracted worker is an employee of the provider company, with the provider company responsible for payroll, employee taxes, benefits, and other employee-related expenses. The company hiring these contract employees is thus free of the associated bookkeeping and administrative costs of maintaining these employees on its payroll—it makes a single payment to the company from which it is leasing the employees, rather than paying the workers individually.
These leasing or outsourcing arrangements are attractive to new or emerging companies or mature companies that may be experiencing an unusual spike in demand, or some other kind of nonrecurring event, presenting a solution for a company that needs to modify its workforce capacity with some upside or downside flexibility.

Recruitment: Inside versus Outside the Company.

One of the first questions the company’s human resources department is likely to ask is whether to fill job needs internally or to look outside the company. Hiring internally allows the manager to choose from a known pool of talent and can minimize misperceptions among candidates about the actual requirements of the position. In addition, hiring from within can be cost-effective and provide motivation for existing employees.

Generally, it is advisable to look outside the company when specific skills are required for the position and existing employees may
not be reasonably expected to train for or learn these skills. The decision to look outside the company tends to be more appropriate when there is a specific need to fill, such as technical requirements. Hiring from outside also helps to avoid the ripple effect of frequent internal staffing changes and the employee “musical chairs” syndrome that does not give staff time to mature into their respective jobs. (Though sometimes well-planned cross-training for different jobs within a company is a productive long-term strategy.)

Finally, recruiting outside the company can be an effective way to import experience and creativity or new ways of doing things. This infusion of outsider perspectives and approaches can infuse the company with a fresh look at its processes and systems.